Medgar Evers

             Medgar Evers, born in 1925, served in WWII before becoming widely known as a civil rights activist. When the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision came out, Evers quit his insurance job, and immediately tried to integrate the Mississippi Law School. Despite failing the do so, he caught the eye of the NAACP and became their field secretary. He was the first on in Mississippi. His objective was to recruit as many people as he could for the civil rights movement and he very much succeeded.
               One of his most notable accomplishments was his leadership in the boycott campaign of white merchants to arose tension and attention. He was also highly regarded for his instrumental work in the eventual desegregation of the University of Mississippi with the admission of James Meredith.
              On June 12th, Evers arrived home from the New Jerusalem Baptist church (where there had just been a meeting for the movement). In his arms, a handful of shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go" and as he exited his car, he was shot. His death was tragic to the people of the civil rights movement, and tragic to those who knew him. Event he governor of Mississippi called the murder a "dastardly attack." The death provoked angry protests for the following moth or so, forcing the Jackson police to use force against the relatively peaceful protestors.
               The killer, Byron de la Beckwith, was tried twice in the following year of the murder but was let go by the majority white jury. However, the story ends hopeful as thirty years later, in 1994, Beckwith was tried and convicted of the murder of Medgar Evers. He only served seven years of his life sentence before dying of a heart attack in 2001.

http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/53/medgar-evers-and-the-origin-of-the-civil-rights-movement-in-mississippi
http://www.naacp.org/oldest-and-boldest/naacp-history-medgar-evers/
http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/medgar-evers